


It's Only a Paper Moon

by orphan_account



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale is a demon and Crowley is an angel (or so they think), M/M, technically an alternate universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 01:11:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19780165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Up on the moon, an Archangel and a Prince of Hell devise a wicked scheme and create a world where one Sauntering Demon never Fell, and where the Angel of the Eastern Gate had been the snake in the Garden instead. Or, at least, so it would seem to them and only them.





	It's Only a Paper Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blanketforyourshock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketforyourshock/gifts), [JayMitchell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayMitchell/gifts), [PuffinParty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PuffinParty/gifts), [treesblooming](https://archiveofourown.org/users/treesblooming/gifts).



This story begins with a series of falls.

The most important one was the very first of its kind: The Big One. Otherwise known as the Fall, although it had only been officially known as such in archives of an ethereal nature. Consult demonic dossiers and you would more likely be given an account of the Emancipation. After all, falling was essentially something that happened involuntarily, and this Fall had only been involuntary for one such instance. And in that case, it was more of a saunter, really.

Afterwards, there was the falling of apples. Many, many apples had fallen into the lives of many, many humans unwittingly tasked with altering the lives of many, many other people. From the sun-baked hand of the Woman in the Garden to the aggravated head of a physicist resting under the shade of a tree in the springtime, apples had been unfairly heaped with the holy burden of being everywhere, from hands to heads to electronic devices. Trace through the annals of human history and you’ll find apples all the way down.

And the last one, which technically happened sometime in between the Fall and the Garden, was a fall that never did manage to finish its trip. Instead of falling, it orbited. A great rock over the sky, forever following the turn of the Earth like a pathetic, yearning thing. It drooped like the heaviest drop of honey. It glowed like amber culled from the most ancient of trees. It stalked like an omniscient eye on its nightly vigil. The Moon would reach out to the tides imploringly, begging it to kiss the feet of its shores. Doomed to continuously encircle one planet for all of eternity, it stirred the minds of men to madness, for it loved the Earth so.

Or, at least, so some people would like to think.

Fortunately for the Moon, being a rock meant it would feel no such frustration. These attributes were imposed mostly by lovelorn poets who fancied invoking celestial metaphors to degrees that mostly swerved gauche, with occasional detours into contrived.

The plain and simple truth was that the Moon had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Down on Earth, somewhere in London, a demon who had been there for the Big Fall and the First Apple looked upon it, noted its unusual largeness and simply shrugged. Underneath the sunglasses that shielded his inhuman eyes from the all-too-human tendency to pry, his gaze flitted back to and away from the glass window of a corner bookshop. He rounded its outer perimeter repeatedly, like a satellite caught in the axis of its gravitational force. After counting down the agonizing slouch of exactly six-hundred and sixty-six seconds, the demon stomped up the entry path and wrenched the door open, swinging it out as if it too had been caught in the lunar pull. He stepped in with long, determined strides, leaving the cold and empty night behind.

Perhaps the demon should have been looking at the Moon a little more carefully.

Atop it stood two supernatural Beings, one occult and one ethereal. They gazed downward at the bookshop with matching expressions that simmered the oceans beneath. One of the two, a demon otherwise known as the Lord Admiral of the Fleets of Hell, sighed and sent a great gust of wind that blew the roofs off of luxurious coastal estates. The other, an archangel and Air Chief Marshal of the Wings of Heaven, clenched a fist tightly enough to tear fissures into the Moon’s poor, mottled surface.

“They’re… _hanging out?_ ” Said the angel. “I don’t like this.”

“Thozzzze two have been fratenizzzzzing for centuriezzzz,” hissed the demon. 

“The hellfire didn’t take. I don’t know what kind of angel can withstand hellfire. I’m out of ideas for punishment.” 

“The traitor didn’t dizzzzolve in the holy water either. Perhapzz we should be seeking inzzzzzzpiration elsewhere.”

The Archangel Gabriel stopped in the middle of his holy sulking and squinted at his companion.

Beelzebub, Prince of Hell, shook their head and pointed downward at the planet below.

“Humanzzz are quite capable of all sortzzz of wretchednezzz. For exxxxxample, their militariezzzzzz.” The demon exclaimed, making a gesture meant to encompass the sort of state-sanctioned torture that happened in many interrogation rooms off military bases all over the world. 

“Ya don’t say?” The angel spun around on his heels, throwing his most withering stare Earthward. “What’s that gonna do, inconveniently discorporate them for, like, a couple of hours? Uh, I don’t think so!”

Beelzebub snorted, sending a wave of flies into humanity's parks and gardens. “Then what would you suggezzzt, geniuzzzzzz?” They sneered. 

Gabriel looked at the demon brightly, a menacing glow setting the glitter in his eyes afire. “Something soul-crushing,” he simply said.

Beelzebub considered the bookshop and the Beings inside. The two were chatting companionably. It made the Lord of the Flies shiver. “But our kind do not have soulzzzzz that can be crushed.”

Gabriel peered down the bookshop's oculus and noted every pull of their mouths and rise of their voices. Smiles and laughter and other pedestrian, human expressions. It made him twitch uncomfortably. All around them, the bookshop seemed to bulge with a feeling, overwhelming and unspeakable. It ran over the shelves and wafted out of the windows, delicate as a flower bursting to full boom, terrible as a star exploding into a supernova.

“Ooh, I think I’ve got it!” He said. “Oh my gosh, this is so brilliant.”

The Archangel turned to the Lord of Hell with a knowing look. He tilted his head and bobbed on his feet in excitement. Beelzebub merely threw him a confused look.

“What izzzzz it?” They said.

Gabriel gestured to the traitors below. They drank and ate and laughed and partook in other gross, human indulgences. _Yikes._

“Get this. What if we turned them into… _people?_ ”

“Your lot have already done that. Didn’t take. Or have you forgotten about Jezzus Chrizzzzzt?”

“Yeah, all right, scratch that. Come on, work with me here. Brainstorm, baby!”

Gabriel paced on the Moon’s surface as Beelzebub looked on in silent distaste, turning their attention back to the bookshop. There, a demon draped himself over a seat and regarded an angel with a fervor that had all the qualities of the most agonizing kind of torture. Interesting.

Beelzebub raised a hand. Gabriel stopped his insufferable pacing.

“Yeah?”

“What if we ssssimply…gaaavvvvvve them what they wanted?”

The angel walked over to the demon with eyes as wide and shining as the ever-expanding cosmos.

“Keep talking,” he said.

* * *

Crowley hadn’t meant to show up again so soon. It had only been a few weeks since Armageddon ended.

He’d been to the bookshop every other day since, which might have been overkill even for the most magnanimous of celestial beings. Most times, he'd only pop in for a couple of minutes, just because the mood had struck, but on weaker days, he'd practically overextended his welcome, hanging around long after closing and leaving just before the sun came up. 

On this particular night, any qualms about challenging his gracious host's endless patience had barely crossed his mind.

As Crowley luxuriated in the warmth of the wine and the halogen lights, listening to Aziraphale recount some of the more recherché or just plain odd portions of Agnes Nutter’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies, a familiar feeling started to nestle somewhere in him.

“You know, Agnes described you as a sauntering fiende. Interesting, that particular choice. The word saunter seems to have two conflicting possible origins. It either comes from _a la Sainte Terre_ which invokes the undertaking of an important holy crusade or _sans terre_ which would more or less imply homelessness. Freedom, if you like. Of course, Thoreau wasn’t exactly a linguist, so—”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s that deep, angel.”

“You’re right, she must have just meant to describe the way you walk.”

“The way I walk?”

“It’s _unusual_ , you know that!”

“So what if it is!”

It was the same feeling in humans that demons exploited for every temptation, to different ends and degrees, sometimes artful, plenty of times crude.

It slithered and coiled and writhed in the garden of his soul, or the approximation of such, whatever it was that demons were cursed with. It circled a tall tree with the largest, brightest apples that glistened and taunted. The feeling dared him to take his sunglasses off every single time he crossed the bookshop’s threshold. It inveigled him, with the mildest pinpricks of imaginary discomfort, to shrug his jacket off and leave it at the shop so he could come back for it the next day.

It tempted him to imagine what life would have been like if he’d never Fallen.

It made him squirm in his seat.

“Is there something wrong?” Aziraphale asked.

The angel regarded him with an expression most other celestial beings would have reserved for concerns of a grander scale, like the sacking of a fortress built in God’s name, or the burning of grand old churches.

Angel, everything is absolutely perfect, which is precisely what feels wrong, Crowley would have liked to say. Perhaps he could have settled for lobbing jibes at the state of the bookshop, the angel’s clothing or preferences for wine or music or any other such misdirection.

Fortunately for him, at that precise moment, something else seemed to be happening outside.

A tiny drop of light seemed to have fallen out of the sky. Not unlike a meteor, except that those were usually singed to tiny embers by the time they hit the atmosphere. This one grew larger and seemed to be heading straight for the bookshop.

It made Crowley stare out of the window and utter, “what the hell is that?”

The sky seemed to rapidly shift to morning, yet outside, the street remained as quiet and unbothered as if everything had been perfectly fine. As Aziraphale watched him with the same worried expression, Crowley wondered if he might have been seeing things. 

He blinked. The light came closer, still.

“Crowley?” The angel called.

It began to engulf the world outside into a daytime terror, until the shop's view became obscured by a blanket of pure white. It burst in beams through the cracks in the doorway and the windows, charging straight for the demon.

“Crowley—”

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut and clutched the seat tightly until his bloodless hands turned pale as bone.

When he opened his eyes, everything vanished. There was no chair. No bookshop. No London. Just a featureless, boundless sweep of white. Bright, immaculate, sterile. Horrifying as the halls of heaven above.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley called.

No answer came.

Crowley looked down at his feet. They were pale, luminescent, almost as bright as the vast and infinite whiteness before him. As he wiggled his toes he wondered whatever happened to his shoes. He could have sworn he’d kept them on. His clothes were different too. Whenever did he find the time to change into a white robe?

He’d just have to walk until he could find someone who could give him some answers.

Now, if only he remembered how he’d gotten here in the first place.

Or where he’d been before this.

Or why it suddenly became so cold.

A heavy breeze blew by. He willed his wings to wrap around his freezing body, until he’d had the appearance of a mound of shivering white feathers blindly stumbling through a snowy wasteland.

He wanted to call out to whoever it was he’d been looking for, except that he couldn’t recall the name. It confused and embarrassed him in ways he couldn’t fathom. For why would it upset him to forget somebody he hadn’t known in the first place?

For that matter, he couldn’t recall his name, either.

It felt nauseating, realizing he’d forgotten. As if he’d discovered a neglected cavern in the soul where faceless ghosts roamed aimlessly, wailed soundlessly, and despaired helplessly.

He closed his eyes, hoping and praying that this was all just a terrible nightmare from which he’d soon wake.

Except, angels didn’t sleep, so of course they didn’t dream.

He heard the faintest sound of a voice calling out to him.

“ _Raphael?_ ” It said.

Whoever it was called out with a voice as resonant as the music of the very lyre men once enlisted to challenge God, Themselves.

“ _Raphael?_ ” The voice called again, more insistently this time.

And so the angel Raphael stirred.

A smooth, cold hand cradled his cheek. He shook long strands of his own hair off his face, for it somehow managed to fall off the queue he thought he'd kept rather tightly braided. He opened his eyes and spotted hair that blazed white, as if it were atop a head that wore a crown of the hottest hellfire. He’d been sprawled in a rather ungainly manner on the deep velvety red divan in the middle of the dark, polished, impeccably kept bookshop he’d favored in all of London. And over him, its demonic proprietor regarded him with curious eyes that had all the qualities of an oncoming storm.

“Ezra?” Raphael croaked. “What just happened?”

“Oh dear, I fear that you might have become somewhat of a lightweight,” his old friend lamented. “Perhaps it’s time to call it a night.”

The demon set the angel down and crossed the room, over to where several empty bottles of red Musigny lay. As he began to straighten the mess out, Raphael observed him through a faint fog of unease, not unlike the disquiet people felt when they’d recognized a moment of déjà vu. As he watched the demon put his tinted spectacles back on, a shiver went through the angel's spine. 

Maybe he did need some proper sleep.

The demon crossed the room again. A back of a hand came upon a forehead. Raphael looked up. 

“Err, what are you doing?” He said.

The hand moved from his forehead to his temples. A thumb came under each eye and pulled them open gently.

“Checking to see if you’re in any state fit to drive, my dear,” Ezra answered.

Raphael batted the hand away from his face. “Aaaaand what if I’m not?” He said.

“Then I’ll simply have to fly you home.”

The angel yawned, rather inelegantly. “So, what’s the verdict, then?” 

The demon rolled his eyes. He shook his head and sighed, stretching out a neatly manicured hand to his ethereal companion.

“Come on.”

* * *

In a dream that felt like another world, in another lifetime, an angel and a demon sat side-by-side on a bench in the middle of a park at the beginning of springtime in London. A quartet of violinists played a tempered fugue that fluttered and fluxed with the sound of a light shower, a swift breeze, a chorus of birdsong, and all of the sweeping credences of the season. All around them, people went about their day undisturbed, as if everything had been perfectly ordinary.

Only, the world had nearly ended the previous day. 

And in the rarest of opportunities—that was, being blessed with the perception and rejection of near-certain doom—it only felt natural to reconsider the shape of one’s life, and to evaluate the choices one had made thus far.

The angel watched the demon regard him from underneath pitch-black sunglasses. As their knees knocked and their shoulders bumped and their hands nearly brushed by a hairsbreadth, the angel felt a scant chorus rejoice mightily, somewhere in the silent hollow of his being. It soared at the faintest hint of a smile and sighed at every word. Beyond the miracles and the magic and whatever heavenly trappings the angel had possessed, he understood—with all the certainty of the divine—that the demon saw him. That he truly saw the angel and accepted him, gifts and burdens and all.

It was precisely why it had pained the angel so the moment the demon turned to him and extended an invitation that he’d had to swiftly decline. The angel hadn’t known exactly why he'd rebuffed the demon’s advances, other than having the instinctive feeling that it was the right thing to do.

Of course, he was still getting used to having to tell the difference between what he ought to do from what he’d been told was right and just and true.

He watched the demon and wondered what it must have been like to be so certain of oneself. To follow the beat of one’s own drum, and answer to mostly nobody. To never question the character of one’s heart or the virtues of one's desires. To look upon a tree in a garden, take the fruit it bore gracefully and dauntlessly, and to feast on it without the slightest hint of regret.

All around him, the trees seemed to mourn.

Suddenly, long branches bent down to a gust of wind that began to blow relentlessly, leaves tearing out and flying upward, covering the sky in a great dark sheet. Crows and ravens and all the other birds in the sky flew over to sweep away the sun, the clouds, and every last pocket of light.

It spun the whole world into a lightless, airless keep.

The ground shifted and lurched.

The angel tried to reach out to grab a hand that was no longer there.

He fell.

As he tumbled down what seemed to be an endless pit, the he tried to scream, but no sound came out of his mouth.

And the farther he fell, the hotter it burned.

He felt confused. Abandoned. Helpless.

From behind him, black feathers seemed to spill out and join the tangle of terrors that had choked out all signs of life. He tried to call out to someone, except that he couldn’t piece the name together. It slipped around and away from the impotent grip of his unraveling resolve, churning in the flurry of delirious tongues howling in the storm of his very soul. Every scream seemed to bleed into each other, in a polyphonic song of the damned, where the lone sound he’d reached out to flitted out and disappeared, as elusive as the Almighty, Themselves.

As the wailing rose and the chorus of ghosts labored to their raucous refrain, he closed his eyes and began to sink into the pure despair that overcame the irredeemably damned.

A drumbeat hammered in a space where a heart should not have been, for demons had no hearts with which to feel.

Everything was so loud.

He was so alone.

He began to take deep breaths.

“ _Aziraphale?_ ” Somebody whispered.

The voice was soothing. It washed over him like water running over coarse rock, patiently smoothening it down to the finest grains of sand.

He closed his eyes and willed himself to follow the sound of a voice that called out to a name that was no longer his. 

“ _Aziraphale…_ ” it called out again.

As he reached up sightlessly, he felt a calloused hand take hold of him by the wrist and haul him up. Suddenly, his knees hit the hard, gravel surface of the ground. He’d stopped falling but his head was still spinning.

“Ezra, look at me.”

He opened his eyes and found them staring into a gaze that glowed as vividly and violently as the brightest star in the morning sky. He blinked around and slowly realized they were sitting in a the pathway in the middle of St. James’ Park. He got up, patted out the dust and smoothed the creases down his perfectly kept charcoal suit.

Raphael watched him with arms crossed, head tilted, brow raised, toe tapping. “What was that?” He said.

“I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest—”

“You fainted,” the angel interrupted.

“I fainted?” The demon repeated, rather insipidly.

“Yes, and you fainted immediately after I… you know what, never mind that, it’s not important. Look, has something happened?” The angel turned his head from side to side to take in a thorough view of the park, in a rather oversuspicious fashion.

“What do you mean?”

“You were muttering something. About crows, or whatnot.”

“Actually—”

“Hold that thought, too many ears. Come on, bandstand.”

They wove through knots of everyday human activity and skittered across the quiet, unoccupied lees, cutting through a path that involved walking right over the duck pond, hovering past fences, and treading lightly over freshly shorn grass until they reached their destination. They might have accidentally stepped on the heads of a couple of pigeons and ducks and fish, on the way. As Ezra watched his companion evade and slip and tiptoe away, he couldn’t help but feel that something about the whole dreadful procedure seemed quite amiss. It didn’t make sense for an angel to be so mistrustful of heaven, but then again Raphael had been odd from the start. There was the whole business with the flaming sword, after all.

“All right, what was that you were saying?” The angel said.

It was the demon’s turn to conduct the standard protocol strictly abided by the paranoid. Or rather, perform an approximation of it to the angel’s satisfaction. He looked in every which direction and rounded the bandstand’s perimeter once, checking to see if the coast was clear. Afterwards, he leaned in conspiratorially, willing the angel to come closer. 

“I had the strangest dream. Strange because it hadn’t felt like one at all,” he whispered. “Something about it felt a little… right. Comfortable. Normal. We were here in the park, having a conversation that felt almost familiar. The oddest part was that everything in the world had been nearly exactly the same as it is now, except I was an angel, and you were a demon.”

The angel waved a hand dismissively. “All right, ridiculous.”

“Oh, perhaps it is. Strange to think it felt quite like a memory, is all.”

“And in this dream of yours where I’m a demon and you’re an angel, we’re still friends?”

“Friends?” Ezra scoffed, or performed an approximation of such. “We’re hereditary enemies.”

Of course, he’d like to think they were friends, but damnation was such dreadful business, and it would be a shame to lead a perfectly good angel on the path downwards.

Unfazed, the angel answered, “oh come on, how long have we known each other?”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

Raphael looked at him imploringly, for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Then, he stepped out from the bandstand and walked away, down the tree-lined path. The demon merely followed. They walked out of the gates and into the spotless, cream-colored Austin-Healey parked right along the curb where it shouldn’t have been. 

As they drove off, the angel turned to the demon and asked, “so everything was exactly the same?” 

“Well, nearly everything. The other difference was we that had already stopped Armageddon.”

“And in this version of events, we worked together?”

Ezra shrugged. “I suppose we must have.”

A familiar song began to trickle in through the car’s stereo. These days, the Austin-Healey was going through a bit of an Elton John phase.

“Imagine that,” the angel muttered.

Without another word, the car headed for the Ritz, where a table for two had just mysteriously freed up.

* * *

From the Moon, two Beings, one holy and the other hellish, manifested plush seats and passed around a bowl of popcorn that seemed to pop constantly, refill itself infinitely, and change flavor depending on what one feels like the precise moment a piece would land on the tongue.

“Yeah, okay, so you just switched their jobs. What the heck is that gonna do?” Said the angel.

The demon squinted into a pair of sleek black binoculars. “Juussssst you wait,” they hissed.

Gold kernels popped like artillery fire, sending bursts of debris crashing down in the world of a single translucent serving bowl. As the archangel Gabriel and the demon Beelzebub watched, the world below drew back its curtain as the scene of urban activity slowly came alive. They watched and waited and waited and waited some more. The biding would be tedious, and each thought their company rather offensive, but as they passed the bowl of popcorn and looked down from their front row seats atop the beaten satellite that shone with borrowed light, their expectation sharpened into excitement.

All they had to do now was keep watching.

**Author's Note:**

> The unofficial etymology for the word "saunter" comes from the essay [“Walking” by Henry David Thoreau ](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/)
> 
> Much thanks to anybody can point me to where the fanon of Crowley once having been the angel Raphael originated, so I can give proper credit!


End file.
